Negative effects of religion?

Alright, let's assume your points about cross national comparisons are correct. How do you explain the strikingly amoral practices of the Red states compaired to the nearly puritanical behaviors of blue state New England?

is it later yet?

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand

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RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

Look at the thread linked in my previous post and scroll down a little. I did all of that a long while back.

"Of course I'm always very untrusting of studies like these regarding anything. If you ask a kid if he/she's had sex or drunk booze, the initial response is going to be a boastful one. i.e. Yes. that's bound to skew the results of these things."This is a very good point, Creavolution. But let's just leave my point as my opinion, and your opinion that I'm wrong about the practice of religious morals at that. Our opinions.This message has been edited by christ_fanatic, 10-09-2005 10:54 PM

Greetings and good day, Coragyps! You have chosen to title your topic "Negative effects of religion?" I read the article from the Times, and I DO agree that there is cause for thought on these matters! Is this your conclusion? Lets use a parable to explain my opinion on the matter, shall we?Karl Marx was quoted as saying that "Religion is the opium of the masses" I read about opium in Pearl Bucks classic book, "The Good Earth." This insidious drug rotted people out from the inside out! At first glance, Marx has an apt analogy. Lets ponder the meaning further, however.Percodan is an opiate. Used correctly, Percodan can make many an operation or a dental visit less painful and less stressful for the person using such an opiate.Spirituality is also a social "painkiller". Faith in God often gives people comfort that a higher power is in control of their problems and destinies. Fundamentalist faith, however, is like a drug addiction. It causes people to deny reality. It traps them in a continual quest for religious fixes to problems that require educated strategies and actions.Used incorrectly, Percodan can create an addicted sociopath or a deluded citizen, as Rush Limbaugh found out. Fred Phelps could be labled as a religiously addicted sociopath.Used incorrectly, religion can ruin an individual or a society. God may provisionally guide us, but we are not to use God as an excuse for ignorance, arrogance, or world domination! It simply does not add up, IMHO. I would refine this statement to say that the study is biased. I would agree that excessive fundamentalism is unnecessary and unhealthy, but belief and worship are in and of themselves not the issue. I think that the problems described stem from the worship and idolatry of money rather than the worship of God. Many televangelists actually worship money. God is not the problem. The problem between "blue states" and "red states" is not God versus rationality. The problem is the legislation of morality, when man tries to deify self instead of using common sense. It all gets back to our "two trees analogies." The Tree of Life=eternal peace, harmony,and infinite reality. The Tree of Knowledge = self deification, competition, war, and finite death. The TOE and belief in God are not mutually exclusive. Evolution and God are not at War.

Actually I don't fault the religious issues for this divide so much as the blind acceptance of statements from persons of perceived authority - preachers, politicians, tv news, etcetera.There may be a correlation between faith and such blind acceptance or they may be co-related to another factor (ignorance? education? nutrition? etc?). To do a proper study you have to control for all the variables.A poster on another board tried to show that atheists were more moral than believers as they were much less likely to be in prison than people of faith, by comparing prison beliefs data from one study with data on the proportions of different faiths outside prison from another study.There were several problems, a major one (imho) is that the data sets (questions, kinds of responses, etc) were not comparable, a secondary one was that the margins of error overlapped between the two studies (so they could have been exactly the same proportions), and another was that there was no control to see if prisoners were claiming faith to get some additional privaleges, but the biggest one that I could see was that the prison population was not representative of {criminals in general}, just the ones that were caught and convicted.The more intelligent or connected ones would be filtered out (get away, have better lawyers, etc) and this could easily include the atheist more than the believers (based on that trend in the general population).The only valid conclusion that I could see from all the data was that there was no marked reduction in prison population that would correlate with the proposition that religious belief leads to moral behavior.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand

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RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

I thought that was a very good analysis of the analyses. One point though... I don't see much difference between religious and athiests on this, except perhaps that athiests have fewer and different people they perceive as authorities.Many seem to have bought into the idea that most western laws are simply obviously true and better. And anything said in a "progressive" manner, must also be true.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

ThanksNot having any atheist preachers (except maybe Dawkins )... they would have fewer.There does seem to be a small correlation between atheism and education, and a small inverse correlation between education and {blind acceptance of statements from persons of perceived authority}. Is it significant? I don't know.It may just be due to heightened awareness.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand

​

RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

quote:

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I don't see much difference between religious and athiests on this, except perhaps that athiests have fewer and different people they perceive as authorities.

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How can athiests have perceived authorities with regard to athiesm? As an athiest it means I don't follow any religion so I don't have authorities for my lack of belief in god/gods/pink unicorns. I don't even know for the most part what other athiests think since I rarely encounter them. If I read Dawkins it is because he has interesting things to say scientifically, though I disagree with his extreme reductionism. But he is certainly no guide or inspiration for my lack of religious beliefs.

I didn't say there were authorities with regard to atheism. However there are authorities with regard to morality and knowledge and practical day to day matters. These authorities do not have to be individuals either.The bonus that religious people have is that they can have all their authorities wrapped into one person. I agree, except I'd ask if he doesn't inspire your views somewhat (in the snes of making you feel a bit better about them)? He does have some interesting ways of putting things and he is clearly trying to inspire some people toward atheism. Even if it does not work for you it works for some, and that is the same for religious people.My point is not that those without religion have a single belief system, as religious people do not either. Just that there is the same gullible mass among the nonreligious who have simply swapped authorities. Secular authorities are just the same as religious ones.Heck we have people here claiming that science is what guides their morality. Its a simple switch. Common themes for the nonreligious center on the same themes as the religious, but use ephemeral humanist terms and lack of evidence, not to mention hypocritical positions, to make their arguments. Women's Rights, Children's Rights, Secularism (as somehow a singular meaning), AntiSmoking, Health (as if that means one thing), etc. It's all wound up in "progressive" causes.In the other thread on sharia law there was a great site pointed to where so called secularists were actually telling people multiculturalism was bad and that secularism meant only one set of laws, suggesting science and knowledge (some sort of peer review) would find that best way to live. Here is an apt quote... I couldn't find the quote I had seen before and sent vast chills down my spine. Someone was saying how multiculturalism means we are supposed to respect cultures, but cultures should only be respected as they conform to our "modern" belief system of inalienable rights. It made me want to buy a gun.Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

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The bonus that religious people have is that they can have all their authorities wrapped into one person.

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I think in addition to having it wrapped up into one person (though hundreds of disparate contradictory organizations), they also then re-enforce it through a hierarchical organization based on money i.e. the RC church.Since athiests are not a religion, much less organized, the authorities will be much more diverse and personal...and poor

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I agree, except I'd ask if he doesn't inspire your views somewhat (in the snes of making you feel a bit better about them)? He does have some interesting ways of putting things and he is clearly trying to inspire some people toward atheism. Even if it does not work for you it works for some, and that is the same for religious people.

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Not really, for me at least. I don't really look to others to make me feel better about my being an athiest. Most of the people around me are not. We just don't discuss it. My problem with Dawkins is he wants people to think like him yet as an athiest, I don't necessarily see things the same way as he does and do not see him as my guide. Niether of us believe in the supernatural and we both study evolution. End of similarities that I know of. For the same reason I don't follow religions that state that they are the way to the truth, I don't follow non-religious people when they "tell" me that they are right just on their say so.But I do concede that non-religious people can be gullible as anyone else in politics, science, etc. In my experiences in developed countries, I have never met an uneducated athiest. But I have certainly know some who still have some misguided political beliefs. But regarding education, this may be where Dawkins becomes like the religious. He coined the term Brights for athiests. I think he cannot fathom that people would be willfully ignorant so wants to segregate those who are not with a special term. This is elitist and very much what the religious do. An interesting convergence.